https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/u-s-won-t-have-coal-by-2030-john-kerry-predicts-in-glasgow-1.1679307

(Bloomberg) – John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate, predicted the world’s biggest economy will stop burning coal by the end of the decade.

“By 2030 in the United States, we won’t have coal,” Kerry said Tuesday during an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. “We will not have coal plants.”

The U.S. has a long way to go to become coal free. President Joe Biden’s most ambitious efforts to wean the nation from fossil fuels through a $1.75 trillion spending bill have been thwarted by opposition from Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from coal-rich West Virginia. Manchin holds a key swing vote in the Senate and has pushed to remove provisions hostile to coal.

The U.S. gets nearly 25% of its electricity from the fuel, and many of the nation’s largest power companies don’t plan to phase out their emissions from fossil fuels until 2050.

(Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP — the parent company of Bloomberg News — committed $500 million to Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-fired power plants in the U.S. by 2030 and halting the development of new natural gas-fired plants. He also started a campaign to close a quarter of the world’s remaining coal plants and all proposed coal plants by 2025.)

https://www.fedscoop.com/palantir-reports-34-rise-in-q3-government-revenue/

Palantir Technologies has recorded a 34% year-on-year rise in third quarter revenue within its government services division.

Revenue at the unit rose to $218 million up from $163 million in the prior year period, accompanying a 36% rise in the company’s total Q3 revenue growth.

The jump in public sector earnings follows a number of major contract wins for the AI and machine learning company, including with the Air Force, the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health.

The company also last month was selected to provide the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System-Army Capability Drop 2 – an intelligence and data fabric contract that is expected to be worth up to $823 million.

Last month, FedScoop revealed that Palantir had inked a $90 million data integration contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The company has also inked a slew of smaller contracts recently, running from several thousand dollars to several million with agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Patrol and the National Institutes of Health, according to federal procurement records.

Within Palantir’s private sector division, revenue rose by 37% to $174 million. In total, the company closed 54 deals each worth at least $1 million during the third quarter.

https://tass.com/world/1359317

MINSK, November 9. /TASS/. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that a mafia-like structure operates in the European Union and organizes the transit of migrants.

"People go to the border. Yesterday, for the first time, about 2,000 of them or maybe slightly more than that have been in various places — in Minsk, in forests. They were transported there," Lukashenko said in an interview to the editor-in-chief of the Russian magazine National Defense, Igor Korotchenko. The Belarusian news agency BelTA has quoted an extract from this interview.

According to him, certain people take care of their transit. "They help migrants board aircraft, welcome them in Belarus, take them to the border, help them cross the border, and then Poles, Germans, Ukrainians welcome them over there. Everything is in exchange for money," the Belarusian president said adding that Minsk tracks down the whole scheme. "People in Poland have already been detained and they even had to declare who they are. No Belarusians and only two Russians among them. And dozens of the transit facilitators that help migrants travel are Germans and primarily Poles, there are also Ukrainians and Lithuanians". According to him, a "certain mafia-like structure enables transit."

"They have their own cells in Germany, France, and other countries. They call each other, tell migrants to come and promise they will be welcomed. And they look forward to the migrants’ arrival," Lukashenko said. He also noted that the migrants do not travel to "an empty space", they travel specifically to the people waiting for them in Germany instead. "Some have relatives, friends, and someone else. It would be stupid to think that people are just crazy enough to travel for thousands of kilometers. Everything is smoothly organized. And Belarus is just another stage of the journey," Lukashenko pointed out.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-wisconsin-elections-health-0b15fbe2fcbe267509c542bcbdfb5871

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A bipartisan group of more than 50 elections officials is rallying behind the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator who has come under attack by Republican legislators with claims of voter fraud.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has called for Meagan Wolfe’s resignation for decisions the Elections Commission made last year during the coronavirus pandemic.

The elections officials from states across the country sent a letter Monday to Vos attributing much of the success of Wisconsin elections to Wolfe’s competent leadership. The letter was organized by the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.